The efficiency architect: How Qi Sun is designing the next generation of human-centric AI

Recently, the results of the 2026 iF Design Awards have been officially announced, and among the world’s leading innovators, product designer Qi Sun has been recognized for her leadership in the design of DrayEasy. Her award-winning project is an "Expedia-like" platform that streamlines complex logistics by unifying quoting, booking, and real-time tracking for shippers into an automated platform. This recognition marks a significant milestone in Sun’s career-long effort to modernize enterprise workflows through intelligent design.

The iF Design Award is widely recognized as one of the most prestigious and competitive design honors in the world. Since its establishment in 1953, it has served as a global symbol of design excellence. Each year, the competition draws nearly 11,000 submissions from over 70 countries, all competing for the approval of an independent panel of more than 130 international design experts. With only a limited selection of entries earning the title of "Winner," the award is strictly reserved for projects that demonstrate superior innovation, social responsibility, and functional integrity. For Qi Sun, this honor validates a career-long dedication to the idea that design should be the bridge between powerful technology and the users.

As a designer specializing in the business-to-business sector, Sun operates in an environment where the measure of a product’s success is its ability to facilitate work. While consumer-facing design often prioritizes engagement and delight, business-facing design is an exercise in structural efficiency. Sun’s work is focused on empowering enterprise productivity through research-driven, human-centric design.

Sun believes that in the current era of enterprise software, the value of innovation is defined by how effectively it reduces the cognitive load of the operator. As Artificial Intelligence transitions from a speculative tool into an essential functional layer of industry, Sun argues that we need a new standard for interaction. This standard must prioritize clarity and functional efficiency over technical complexity. To her, AI should not be a replacement for human agency; rather, it should function as a "Co-pilot," handling the mundane and repetitive aspects of a job so that the human user can focus on high-level strategy and creative problem-solving.

Qi Sun’s design approach is best seen in her current work with digital advertising for businesses. For many small business owners, digital ads can feel like a "black box" full of confusing jargon and data. As the lead designer for a next-generation advertising platform built to help small businesses grow, Qi Sun led the design process from the ground up. She used a

business-first strategy to design a self-service system that turns complex ad setups into a simple, standard decision-making process for users.

Sun focused on redesigning how users set up ad purchases, turning technical settings into clear business goals. Instead of asking users to deal with low-level technical parameters, the interface guides them to focus on what they want to achieve commercially. This shift in the decision process led to a 41.35% registration-to-payment conversion rate, which is much higher than the typical 2% to 5% seen in enterprise software. Currently, Sun is working on new

AI-powered features to help businesses automate their strategy and get ad solutions that are personalized to their specific growth stage.

To make professional reports easier to read, Sun created a simple visual style and easy-to-understand charts. By using AI to explain exactly how ad performance affects a

business’s profits, she helped users feel more confident about their marketing spend. This approach resulted in a 91.33% average monthly retention rate.

Beyond the commercial sector, Sun’s project InsightPro+ demonstrates how her design philosophy can be applied to solve education challenges. In higher education, faculty members are often overwhelmed by student data that they cannot efficiently translate into teaching insights. Sun envisioned InsightPro+ as a strategic "Co-pilot" that automates data entry and analysis, returning valuable time to the educator.

The platform prioritizes "actionable insights" over raw data, highlighting student learning obstacles without requiring the teacher to possess advanced technical skills. This transparency allows for more personalized student support, ensuring that at-risk students are identified early through AI-assisted pattern recognition. Sun also emphasized the importance of collaboration between different stakeholders, creating an environment where teachers and administrators can interact more effectively. The project’s impact has been recognized by several major international design honors, including the French Design Award (2025 Gold), the American Good Design Award (2025 Gold), etc.

The success of Qi Sun’s professional career is rooted in her academic foundation at Carnegie Mellon University, where she earned a Master of Educational Technology and Applied Learning Sciences. This education provided her with a research-based methodology that she applies to every project, ensuring her designs are grounded in a fundamental understanding of how humans process and retain information.

Sun’s commitment to academic rigor is further evidenced by her work as a co-first author on the research paper, "Of Secrets and Seedphrases: Conceptual Misunderstandings and Security Challenges for Seed Phrase Management among Cryptocurrency Users" which has been accepted at CHI 2025. Ranked as the #1 publication in Human-Computer Interaction by Google

Scholar, CHI is the field’s most selective venue. For the 2025 cycle, the conference received over 5,000 worldwide submissions, maintaining a rigorous peer-review process with an acceptance rate of 24.9%.

Her study, which involved over 600 participants, revealed critical security gaps in the cryptocurrency space. The study found that only 43% of users could correctly identify a "seed phrase," exposing a significant misunderstanding of digital asset security. Sun’s research results provide the industry with actionable design paths to create more secure wallets and simplify digital legacy planning. This research underscores her ability to translate high-level academic findings into practical design solutions that protect and empower users.

As Artificial Intelligence continues to reshape the professional landscape, the work of Qi Sun highlights the necessity of human-centric architecture. Her career serves as a reminder that as software becomes more capable, the role of the designer becomes more critical in ensuring that capability remains accessible and helpful.

“We are moving from an era where software acts as a tool to an era where it functions as a partner,” Sun explains. “As designers, our responsibility is to ensure that as technology advances, it remains focused on its primary goal: assisting the user.”

Through her work across logistics, advertising, and education, Qi Sun continues to prove that exceptional design is not merely a matter of aesthetics. Instead, it is the essential engine for building trust, achieving efficiency, and driving measurable growth in an increasingly complex digital world.

This article was written in cooperation with Tom White